He squeezed her shoulder affectionately. ‘You’re not even listening to me,’ he chided gently.
‘I am,’ she responded. ‘It’s just that you’ve been talking about this painter ever since you got here this evening and, quite honestly, I’m beginning to wish I was a man.’
Horne looked at her curiously. ‘What on earth do you mean by that?’ he asked, then laughed delightedly as she rose, straddled his chest, and then thrust her wet, warm crotch into his face. ‘Because I know you’d never dream of speaking with your mouth full,’ she replied. ‘And, if I was a man, I’d be able to fill it.’
‘Oh, I don’t think you need worry yourself on that score,’ Horne told her; opening his mouth slightly, he started sucking gently at her vagina, drawing the sticky pink flesh into his mouth, swirling it in one cheek, then pausing to pull in more. Suddenly, she stopped him, releasing her grip on his cock as she squirmed away from him.
Now it was her turn to slip down, her lips nuzzling his belly, her tongue flicking out to taste a fresh part of his flesh. For a moment, her mouth hung poised over his cock, as it strained up to meet her lips; she planted a light, lingering kiss on the tip, and then she moved away and started, instead, to nibble his inner thighs.
Occasionally the side of her head would brush his balls, sending a new thrill racing through him; occasionally, too, her mouth would stray into his groin and gently suck at the skin. By the time she did turn her attention elsewhere, her warm mouth greedily engulfing him, holding stock still for a moment and then pulling abruptly away, every fibre in Horne’s body had centred itself in the area she was teasing so delicately.
She sat up; his cock was glistening with her saliva, and a bright droplet of pre-come nudged its way out. Smiling, she licked it off, then squeezed the glans gently. Another droplet, another gentle lick, and this time there was a gossamer-thin thread of moisture that stretched from his cock to her mouth.
Reaching out for the wineglass on the table, she took a deep draught, and sloshed it around her mouth, bathing her gums and tongue. Then her mouth plunged over him again, and the sensation was indescribable, the deep heat of the wine sending every nerve-end into delicious paroxysm. She paused as the alcohol worked its magic on his glans, then lunged again, taking him deeper than she ever had before. Only this time, she withdrew almost reluctantly, before sinking down again, her hands locked onto his hips as she held him firm and upright between her lips.
‘Again?’ He whispered and she smiled, took another mouthful of wine, then another of his shaft. Once more, the gentle fire left his entire body tingling. Horne felt his balls tighten; any moment now... she sensed it too, pulled away and, in one deft movement, she was astride him, her cunt sliding up and down his cock, willing it further and further inside her. He hammered himself back against her, faster and harder, as he felt himself coming.
It was as though his entire body was exploding, pushing against her to empty every last drop deep inside her. His eyes were closed, his thrusts became less urgent – and suddenly she was gone, lifting herself off him ... and then settling herself down again, this time directly over his face. Her cunt was soaked with their mingled juices, but Horne snatched at them greedily, savouring and swallowing the delectable cocktail, the thickly perfumed taste of their lovemaking.
It was salty, it was sweet – it was good. He swallowed, then searched for more as she moved above him, rubbing herself against his face, faster and faster until – with her thighs clamped against his ears, he had barely heard her utter a sound until now, but suddenly she gave a cry, a moan and one final, massive thrust. And then she was lying beside him, her own tongue tracing lines in the juices that caked his face. ‘OK, maybe I don’t wish I was a man,’ she laughed. ‘But now, you were saying ...’
Horne laughed back. ‘It doesn’t matter. Unless, of course, you can read Hellenic pictograms?’
‘Sorry, it’s all Greek to me,’ she giggled, and he hit her gently with a pillow. ‘That’s the problem,’ he mused. ‘I don’t think it is.’
Rising from the bed, he crossed the room and plucked a small leatherbound book from his jacket pocket. ‘Scheffer’s Chemiske Forelasningar,’ he announced proudly. ‘It was published a century-odd after our man Oliver passed away, but the principles are the same.’ Then, registering the look of absolute confusion that crossed his audience’s face, ‘there’s a table of alchemical symbols – the shorthand notations that were developed to represent different chemicals and potions.’
‘So Oliver was an alchemist?’ Lady H_____ asked slowly. ‘A strange hobby for a painter.’
‘No stranger than that of religious iconoclast, I’d have thought,’ Horne mused. ‘You see, that’s what has been gnawing at me all the time. If we were talking about Leonardo Da Vinci, it would make sense – people have been discovering arcane symbols and allegories in his work for centuries, a practice that he himself deliberately encouraged.
‘Oliver, on the other hand, simply got on with his paintings, had no conflicts with either the Church or the State – or none that we are aware of; and one has to ask oneself, if he was privy to the kind of information that Rowand seems convinced he was: one, how did he come by it, and two: what could he possibly have done with it? Tucking it away in his paintings is certainly an ingenious notion, but only in a cheap suspense novel. There would have been no point to it. So then I asked myself, what else might he have been concealing – or even if he was concealing anything to begin with?’
He reached for his notebook. ‘I’ve drawn up two tables, one of the Greek alphabet, the other of Scheele’s symbols. Do you see the similarities?’
Lady H_____ shook her head. ‘Not really.’
‘Neither did I at first. But remember what I said, these were drawn up more than a century after Oliver died. The symbols he would have known and used, though similar, would have necessarily differed in certain qualities. I still need to research some more, but I do believe I’m on the right track.’
Lady H_____ smiled. ‘In that case, perhaps you could answer an art question that has often perplexed me.’
Horne, scarcely registering the teasing tone in her voice, folded away his papers. ‘I’ll certainly try.’
‘Well, I was just wondering, why were people so fascinated by miniatures? I’d much rather have a giant.’ With that, she took his penis firmly in one hand and began, slowly to masturbate him towards an indeed prodigious erection. And this time, Horne resolved to give her all the attention she could take.
Anybody visiting Ambrose Horne in his rooms in Belgravia that weekend – anybody, for that matter, who even passed them on the street – could not have helped but notice the succession of thick and peculiar odours that emanated from his quarters. Occasionally, the stench would be accompanied by a bright flash; once by a torrent of oaths, as his latest compound exploded violently, and sent shards of glass flying across the room.
Horne had laid out certain parameters for his experiments, based upon what he knew of Oliver himself. The man was an accomplished artist – perhaps he had invented some new kind of brush cleaner? Or even developed a new shade or colour? In the popular imagination, alchemists were concerned with just one quest, transmuting base metal into gold. For an artist, the creation of a new colour would be no less significant an achievement.
However, the best of Horne’s efforts turned up nothing more than a sludgy grey tone, while the most efficacious of his cleaning solutions was little more than a slow-acting acid. Besides, their development required such random selections of symbols, spread across so many paintings and years, that they were no more valid, in his mind, than the religious inscriptions that he was endeavouring to disprove.
He returned to the earliest of the paintings, and the first of the symbols. The principle ingredient appeared to be vegetable acid, indicated by a small cross and an italic ‘v’ To that, one added sal in genere – salt; hydrargyrus (mercury); terra silicea ... Horne warmed the potion, then allowed it to cool – he tested the te
mperature by dipping in a finger, and was astonished to find the liquid congealing around his flesh, a thin, diaphanous membrane that, though it formed itself seamlessly to his flesh, could be peeled away in an instant.
‘The sly old dog,’ Horne mused. ‘He was trying to invent the condom.’
Of course that would make sense. There was no end to the number of contraceptive devices that were tried, if not necessarily trusted, in the centuries before the first true rubbers reached the market in the early 1860s; and no end to the ingenious methods that were experimented with. In Oliver’s day (he died in 1617, aged 57), the most common device was a medicated linen pocket that slipped over the glans and was held into place by the foreskin – a less than effective method, to be sure. Not until the 1660s was a true, all-encompassing sheath developed, by the Earl of Condom no less, in the form of a stretched and oiled sheep’s intestine. But he was only the latest in a long line of would-be inventors and designers, a line that might possibly be extended to include one of 16th century England’s most respected painters of miniatures!
Horne turned to the next few sets of symbols. In many ways, they simply replicated the first, with just the occasional refinement – it was the repetition of certain ‘letters’ that convinced Rowand that he was dealing with some form of code, when in fact he was confronted by an alchemical formulae. Having made that initial error, however, it was easy, Horne breathed, to see where the illustrious scholar had gone awry.
It was less simple to discern where Oliver went wrong. Time and again, as he followed the ever-evolving instructions that the painter had incorporated into his art-work, Horne was able to produce the most exquisite moulds of any body-part he chose; first his fingers, then his hands, a foot and, ultimately, of course, his penis. And every time, the results were the same. No matter how thickly he layered the potion onto his flesh, there was no diminution of sensation; no sense whatsoever that anything stood between skin and its surroundings. If anything, in fact, there was a heightened sensitivity, as though one or other of the chemicals in the material reacted with the nerve-endings to produce an entirely new array of delightful tingles.
Impressive, too, was the way in which every sheath was imbibed with its own distinct aroma, be it strawberries, honey, wine or apples, and Horne smiled broadly at the artist’s ingenuity. The potion itself was all but odourless. But breathe deep, and there was a hint of sulphur there; a hint which, in an age of rampant witch-hunts, might well have led some poor man to the stake. When Lucifer lurked around every corner, his infernal cock ever-ready to pierce some unsuspecting maidenhead, what manner of man could possibly want even a suggestion of that smell about his person?
Yet, for all the refinements that Oliver brought to his invention, there remained one fatal flaw. No matter how assiduously Horne applied the potion, the sheath remained so extraordinarily fragile that it could never have served the purpose for which it had been designed – and he did try it out, one evening with Lady H_____. The sheath was torn and useless within two thrusts, maybe three. It really was most perplexing.
Or was it?
Lady H_____ sat quietly for a moment, gazing at the tattered sheath that lay on the eiderdown between them. ‘Ambrose, I was wondering. What if you, too, were on the wrong track?’
He looked at her. ‘I’m sure I’m not. There really is no other function this material could serve.’
‘In general terms, no there isn’t,’ she agreed. ‘But, think on this ...’ She paused, as though seeking the right words, then changed her mind. ‘Better still, let me try something. Pass me the potion, please.’
Horne obeyed, and watched as she carefully spread it over his glans; then, satisfied that the organ was thoroughly encased, leaned forward and took him in her mouth, slowly and gently, but thrillingly, too, her fingers dancing across his balls, her fist occasionally pumping him.
Within minutes, he felt himself beginning to come; even as his hands slipped to her shoulders, to guide her movements, his body first tensed, then shattered. But when Lady H_____ sat up to face him, and opened her mouth so that he might see his spend, there was none. All had been captured within the bubble that formed at the tip of the sheath and, though the bubble itself was beginning to seep now, and would soon release its contents onto his stomach, the fact was, none had escaped into his lover’s mouth.
‘My God.’ For a moment, Horne was speechless. Lady H_____, on the other hand, could barely control her delight. ‘Oh Ambrose, it makes perfect sense. What do nine-out-of-ten men dream of, but barely one-out-of-ten women willingly do? This way, everybody’s happy. He can come in her mouth, but she doesn’t have to take it. Our friend Mr Oliver quite possibly invented the most perfect aid to gamahuching that man has ever known.’
‘Then why did he bury it away?’ Horne puzzled. ‘Even if he did not wish to have his own name associated with it, one would have thought he could have found somebody to market it. It might have made him a small fortune.’
‘Maybe it did. You said yourself, on every one of his paintings where the symbols appear, there is some variation. Could it be that that variation was the sitter’s preferred – flavour, perhaps? And that, by incorporating the ingredients into the painting, the sitter would then forever have the correct formula to hand, but without ever needing to explain what it meant? After all, it’s scarcely a recipe you would leave lying around the house, is it?’
Horne shook his head. ‘You know, I think you may be correct.’ He swung his feet off the bed. ‘I’m going to need to run further tests – I trust you have no objections to that?’
Lady H_____ laughed. ‘So long as I can have my own kind of fun occasionally. Don’t forget I’m among the one-in-ten, and proud to be there.’
‘I won’t forget. And I know several of the remaining nine, whom I’m sure I can prevail upon, in the interests of sexual science. In the meantime, while your mind is so supremely sharp, I was wondering if you have any suggestions as to how I might break the news to poor Mr Rowand? I think it’s going to come as quite a shock to him – after all, he believes he has the means of sowing the seeds of destruction across the face of the world; when what he actually has are the seeds of life, tightly bound up in a little membranous bubble.’
‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll get over it,’ Lady H_____ shrugged. ‘To be honest, I don’t think there are many matters that can weigh so heavily on a gentleman’s mind that a damned good sucking cannot chase away. And, talking of which, have you decided which lucky girl you will be testing your theory on first?’
Horne nodded. ‘I’m escorting young Lizzie Morton to the Banbury Hunt this weekend; I’m rather hoping it might be her. From our past encounters, I know that she has a definite taste for the chase, as it were. But she has never enjoyed staying around for the kill. I do believe Mr Oliver’s miraculous mixture might alter that scenario.’
‘I do believe it will,’ Lady H_____ agreed. ‘She’s rather partial to absinthe, by the way. You may want to add a drop of that to your brew.’
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The Erotic Adventures of Ambrose Horne Page 8
